In sport and stage-performance, it is highly desirable to have a way to help people reviewing their performance with sufficient details and focuses in order to improve their skills during training exercises and exhibitions. Camera systems are more and more intensively involved in such training and exhibition systems. The cameras produce video records that can be displayed to users. Both trainees and their instructors can review the recorded performance and exhibition in real time or afterwards to find the insufficiency in the trainee's skill and performance. However, traditional camera recording processes usually need the assistance of a professional person to control the orientation of the camera lens in order to have a performance or exhibition best presented in the camera frames with sufficient focuses on the details. Such assistant services are hardly available or affordable for common exerciser and nonprofessional players.
Professional coaches can only provide training in a limited region and time schedule. People live in a farther region are expecting to have a way to get their specialized coaching remotely. The availability of a public accessible camera viewing and reviewing service will be able to help them realize their dream of self-training and remote-training goals in a most effective and cost-efficient way. Their performance can be recorded and review by professional coaches remotely or in a flexible time schedule. Different from common camera based surveillance systems, the proposed camera viewing service system requires high accurate and agile camera view tracking and focusing control technologies. Such a service system has not been available in common public sport or activity places. Existing auto-recording methods for camera system are either insufficient to follow the dynamic motion of a performer or unable to expose quality details of a performance.
In order to provide the desired services, this invention discloses camera system control methods and apparatus that solve the challenging technical problems of high accurate and agile camera view tracking and focusing controls automatically.
High precision and automatic view control is the critical technology to provide high definition video and smooth target object following in camera view. The core view control technology in this invention applies a unique positioning technology based camera orientation control system to guarantee target following smoothness and centering accuracy as well as best target object exhibition in camera view presentation. Through a locally defined coordinate system over the activity field, positioning techniques from vision based and/or WiFi based systems are innovatively integrated to provide accurate positioning and motion estimation of the target object as well as to support precise camera orientation adjustments. Other supportive technologies are also designed to manage public access to the camera channels and camera records.
The invented camera system and its associated communication and control systems are installed at a public activity place. The service system is public accessible, which means that any user can gain control and operation access to the service system. The service system is automatic, which means that the service system can automatically control its camera to capture the best view of a performer or other target objects with satisfactory quality. The service system is connected and convenient, which means that the service user can view and review his/her performance from any network computer devices like PC, tablet computer, smartphone, etc.
The invented camera viewing system aims at supporting performance recording and assessment in sports, activities and exhibitions to provide professional and high quality self-training, remote-training and entertainment services.